The So-Called “Semi-McGovern Moment”

George Will reflects on the public mood in connection with the passing of George McGovern this week:

Four decades and 10 presidential campaigns later, however, the nation is near a semi-McGovern moment.

As Michael suggests in his post on the main blog, candidates running for election are most attentive to the public’s discontent with hyperactive American foreign policy, but then they govern more or less however they see fit. One of the common criticisms of current U.S. policy in Syria is that the election season is preventing the U.S. from being more involved in that country’s conflict. That’s probably true. If so, it would be good for the U.S. if election season didn’t end.

If the “semi-McGovern moment” means that the two major party candidates quarrel with one another about who is more prepared to launch an illegal war on Iran if “necessary,” I submit that there isn’t much of McGovern in the “semi-McGovern moment.” The public is definitely war-weary, but for whatever reason that doesn’t usually translate into political support for antiwar candidates. It also doesn’t seem to change the political incentives for the major party candidates enough to get them to entertain significantly less aggressive policies. That’s probably because all that they have to do to assuage most voters’ fears is to pretend that their aggressive policies are something that they’re not.

It’s supposed to be an encouraging sign that Romney said, “We don’t want another Iraq, we don’t want another Afghanistan,” but all that this tells us is that he wants to avoid multi-year wars of occupation. If that’s all that it takes nowadays to be seen as reluctant to wage war, almost everyone would be. Romney’s numerous uses of the word peace during the debate notwithstanding, that’s very different from saying that he wants to avoid new wars. If America were in a “semi-McGovern moment,” voters wouldn’t be faced with a choice between a hawkish interventionist and an even more hard-line hawk. At least one of the candidates would vaguely resemble someone like McGovern, and to their discredit neither one does.

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9 Responses to The So-Called “Semi-McGovern Moment”

“If America were in a “semi-McGovern moment,” voters wouldn’t be faced with a choice between a hawkish interventionist and an even more hard-line hawk.”

More astonishingly, they wouldn’t be faced with two candidates frantically catering to a small voter bloc that requires binding assurances that the candidate will do the will of the Israeli prime minister.

That such a bloc should even exist here shows that we are way beyond “McGovern moments”. We’re through the looking-glass.

What is going in is simple. We don’t have a draft anymore. That means most Americans have no skin in the game, and the ones who do have skin in the game by choice.

Also, our military was seriously degraded following Vietnam, so we were unable to do much military intervening, even if we had wanted to. Our military has been somewhat degraded by the Iraq and Afghan wars, but nowhere near as much. And, unfortunately, so long as we have military capacity, someone will be tempted to use it.

Opposition to both North Korea and Vietnam were driven by the victims of the draft.

And it was quite important to the architects of Iraq (the majority of whom has artfully sidestepped the draft during Vietnam) that the suggestion of a draft be off the table lest Americans decide that they didn’t want their adolescent children dying for someone else’s brain fart of a “Project for a New American Century.”

If we accept that punishment is a deterrent to crime, then surely the possibility of having our children come home in body bags is a deterrent to wars of choice.

Chris–Protests did not stop either war–opposition did not save any lives. Protests are politically a headache, but considering the number of dead that came back from those two wars you mentioned, I would say that the draft does not keep America out of war or American citizens alive.

And professional soldiers oppose the draft because people who volunteer to be soldiers are more likely to make better soldiers who will be less likely to frag their commanding officers.